‘Azul: Queen’s Garden’ Board Game Review

The original Azul has to be one of the most popular board games of the last five years – having sold over a million copies. Despite this success, the first pair of Azul sequels (Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra and Azul: Summer Pavillion) haven’t been quite as successful. Undeterred, publisher Plan B Games has still chosen to forge on with a fourth Azul game, this time entitled Azul: Queen’s Garden. Where the original Azul was blessed with a straightforward flow and simple, rewarding decisions that pleased new players, Azul: Queen’s Garden is a much heavier experience – but is it still fun to play?

Honestly, no. Or at least, it’s nowhere near as fun to play as the original game or Azul: Summer Pavillion, which for me hits the sweet spot between aesthetics, ease of access and thoughtful gameplay mechanics. Azul: Queen’s Garden bucks the series trend by being both extremely demanding and also quite fiddly – asking a lot from players and often creating moments where someone can get stuck analysing their turn for upwards of five minutes. To counter these points, Azul: Queen’s Garden also offers dedicated gamers a mind-bending puzzle that simply wasn’t present in the earlier games, whilst retaining the same lovely aesthetics.

Each game begins with the players taking a player board to represent their garden and another to be their store. Three grey “joker” hex pieces are placed in the store, and there are nine more empty spaces for more pieces to come later. There are also two spaces for garden expansion tiles, but aside from these outlined areas, the store board is empty. The garden board has six spaces for hex-tile placement, and there are a few ornaments to surround (similarly to Azul: Summer Pavillion) later on when garden expansions are added – spaces for this are clearly visible, and overall there’s little issue with looking down at your board(s) and knowing how you will use them,

This is less clear when it comes to the hex-tiles, which are presented in two shades of green, two shades of purple, blue and yellow, with each set of colours then broken up to include icons with from one to six “pips” of value. For example, the butterfly tiles have two wings, the six tile has a flock of six birds, and several other values use the petals or leaves of plants. The number one is a single tree, etc. The icons themselves are fine, especially once you get used to which one is a four, five or six, but the problem here is the two shades of green and of purple – neither of which is easy to distinguish from its sister colour. I honestly don’t know why this palette was used – six individual colours would have been so much more vibrant.

Anyway, these hex-tokens will be popped into a lovely canvas bag, and then a stack of garden expansion tiles will be split into five smaller stacks – one for each round of the game and then another for certain specific situations. The first of these stacks will then be placed (face down) in the centre of the table, and four randomly drawn hexes will be placed on top of it. The first player will then choose to draft ALL tiles of a specific colour, or ALL tiles of a specific value, although they must leave behind any exact duplicates (for example if there are two blue tiles with one tree, then only one of these can be taken, even if the player chooses to take all other blues, or trees).

After this first selection, the top tile from the garden expansion stack (upon which all the hex tiles were placed during setup) will be lifted off and left aside with any remaining hexes on it. The top tile of the stack will then be refilled with four new hex tiles. As turns roll over, more garden expansion tiles will be taken off the top with between one and three tiles on them, and therefore the total tile pool will expand to include all tiles on all garden expansion tiles – the rule about choosing either pattern or colour now applies to all visible tiles, potentially allowing players to draw three, four or possibly even more tiles.

One thing to note here is that if a garden expansion tile is ever empty, then it is immediately flipped – which will reveal one “filled” hexagon among the empty spaces on it. Garden expansions can then be taken in the same way as hexagon tiles – by the player declaring that they will take the matching colour or pattern (at which point they will take all tiles of that colour or pattern including garden expansions.) Now, you might ask, what do I do with these tiles and expansions once I draft them? Do I place them in my garden? Actually no – you place them on your storage board (which as mentioned earlier can hold a total of 12 hexagon tiles including any jokers, and two garden expansions.)

Now, here’s where Azul: Queen’s Garden takes a hard left away from Azul as we know it… Rather than placing hexagons directly into your garden, you have to pay for them. The cost for any hexagon (including any garden expansion, based on the printed space) is the same as the value of pips on the hexagon – to be paid in either identical-value or colour hexes, or jokers. As with drafting no hexagon that is identical to the one being played can be used, and players can’t mix the colour/pattern currency. So for example, to play a six value blue hexagon, you’ll need to play either five other blue hexagons or five other six-value hexagons. Oddly, the cost includes the chip you wish to place (which is then placed in the garden) whilst any other chips are discarded into the tower to be re-used later.

Players are free to draft tiles (and garden extensions) or place them into their garden as each round of the game rolls on, and a round is only over when every player has completed all the actions that they either can, or wish, to take. There’s a bit of artistry here in managing your moment to draft chips efficiently, but not to overfill your storage so that you can’t take advantage of an opportunity when it arises. Placement matters because each of the four rounds will score a combination of hex colours or patterns, and then at the end of the game, it really matters because of how grouped pieces score – this is the only time when the value of pieces really matters – a four-point hexagon scores four, a six-point hexagon six etc.

There are several issues with Azul: Queen’s Garden in my experience. Mainly, the random nature of the tiles appearing feels very at odds with the weight of decision-making needed to manage the cost of higher value pieces and the need to place them in a certain order. Additionally, I should mention that any pieces placed in storage count against you up to their value when the game ends and you haven’t placed them. In short, going for four, five and six value pieces is a good strategy for scoring, but sometimes those pieces simply don’t come out – or if they do, especially at higher player counts, they may well taken before you have a chance to use them.

This, fundamentally, is part of what might make Azul: Queen’s Garden appeal to some people. There are moments when you’re having to decide whether to draft or place tiles, whilst simultaneously keeping a lot of small, fiddly rules (like the cost of placing pieces) in your head. Sometimes you’ll build up a decent colour or pattern strategy, only to then have to use pieces that you wanted to play, in order to pay the cost of another piece. I suppose what I am saying is that somewhere between random draws, big, swingy decisions and a high rules overhead, Azul: Queen’s Garden definitely loses some of what made the original so accessible and wonderful.

I do appreciate that it may sound like I am very down on Azul: Queen’s Garden and I guess personally, I am. I am unlikely to play this game again because it is just so heavy and often frustrating, without ever feeling as rewarding as other heavy games I enjoy. That said, I tend to like very abstract puzzle games (like this) to be light because I enjoy immersing myself in theme when I play heavy games. So, if you’re a player who enjoys a fairly heavy,, deeply thoughtful puzzle, and especially if you like two-player games, Azul: Queen’s Garden might have a space in your collection. Sadly, it’s not for me.

*** 3/5

Azul: Queen’s Garden is available online at 365Games.co.uk, or at your local games store. Don’t know where yours is? Try this handy games store locator